20080419

Photoshoot By The Lake (ArianeB 5.0 Walkthrough part 6)

ArianeB
or Virtually Date Ariane, probably the best - free - adult dating
simulation game in the world, has been recently upgraded to version 5
.0. The game has been revised, half a dozen of new scenarios have been
added, and there are now over 900 pictures and situations to be
cherished.

Here is the sixth of a series of walkthroughs I am planning to publish.
I’d like to warn you first that playing by the book would
take most of the fun out of the game. But if you are one of those guys
in a hurry…

Warning: this 18+ game contains some exquisite, sorry explicit, nudity.
To put it in other words: if your mommy forbids you to look at thongs
and titties you are not welcome.

It is not that I am passionately playing ArianeB all day long. To
paraphrase the great advise given by Canadian philosopher William
Shatner: "I sometimes go and get me a life but mostly it is life
that gets me first".

The various walkthroughs for ArianeB 5.0 have been dealing with all
major scenarios, except the one that I called Photoshoot By The Lake
on the previous series (ArianeB version 4.x). But as this walkthrough
can be used in its entirety on version 5.0 I don’t see the necessity to
repeat it all over again.

The nice thing about ArianeB is that you can take many sidesteps while
playing, some of these will show you extra scenes, others will trigger
events that are still far away, but others will just screw up the
scenario you had in mind. Exploring all permutations would lead to
hundreds of ArianeB tutorials so I will not attempt to publish them all.
(Here is one called Hot
Beach Romance sent in by Daniel).

This simply means that you can reach several goals in several ways (and
here are just a few of the many examples):

You can visit the strip joint and win the competition without Rebecca;

ArianeB can jump in the pool with a bikini and come out naked;

Rebecca and ArianeB will throw you out if you decide not to join the
Marco Polo game... (Pity that the game ends with the intriguing
swimduo10.jpg image and doesn’t allow you to go on with a girls only
scenario.)

Viewing the ArianeB code

Most ArianeB warriors don’t go unprepared on a trial and error quest but
have a look at the code first. As ArianeB is entirely written in html
and Javascript this is quite easy. Any html page can be opened in
Notepad and looked at. I use a freeware called 2xExplorer
that has been on my pc since my XP SP1 days to look at the code.

Suppose that you want to reach the third option of the previous
paragraph: after the Marco Polo skinny dipping game Rebecca and ArianeB
say farewell and continue the party without you.

You know (by using a thumbnail viewer such as IrfanView)
that swimduo10.jpg
is the picture you are hunting for. Now we need to find the htm file
inside the datingsimulator folder that contains a link to that
particular picture. 2xexplorer takes about a second to find a file
called end96b.htm. The code of end96b.htm doesn’t reveal
anything so probably everything is triggered from another page.

Searching for an end96b.htm string inside other pages reveals the
following code inside text96.htm:

function getout(){parent.ending("end96b.htm");}

...and the getout function is hidden inside: pic96d.htm,
pic96e.htm, pic96f.htm and pic96g.htm. Those 4 pages
all contain a mapped area on the picture that will trigger the picture
we are looking for…

Theoretically you can – by reading all the code in all the pages –
predict every possible situation in ArianeB. But there are of course
nearly 1000 possible situations and nearly 1000 htm pages to deal with.

Hacking the ArianeB code

Htm pages can be altered in any text editor, such as Notepad. Erana
at Shark's Lagoon gave me permission to post the following hacks. I
didn’t try these so use them at own risk:

Strip
show hack: if you'd like to watch the entire strip show, just open
the file text82.htm in your favorite plain text editor, and make the
following changes…The slideshow
trick.The beach
scene hack.

I guess this is my last ArianeB post for quite a while. I still have my Adrian
Berry book to read, my Orb Dream
record to listen to, in a weak moment I promised to make a Dutch
translation for some nifty software and I am in the middle of a new
Unfinished Project that will be published here somewhere in this
millenium...

Oh, by the way, I found out, not so long ago, that the ArianeB logo on
the Metaverse website changes 9 times a day. This is done by a
Javascript-script that checks the hour and publishes the appropriate
picture. Neat, very neat…